How to Blend Tombow Dual Brush Pens

Learn how to blend markers to create beautiful ombre and rainbow lettering effects using Tombow Dual Brush Pens and this simple technique! You will have so much fun playing with these colorful markers and creating your own custom hand lettered designs.

Ever since my high school days of decorating notes that I would pass to my friends between classes, I have always loved a good marker. Today, I’m going to share a fun way to create beautifully blended lettering with some of my favorite markers.

Tombow Dual Brush Pens are a favorite of hand letterers for many reasons. They come in loads of fun colors, so you won’t have any trouble finding the perfect shade. They’re also water-based, which means you can create fun watercolor effects. The brush tips are durable but also very flexible. That makes it easy to get crisp thin upstrokes and nice, thick down strokes.

One of the best things about this pens is that they are blendable! I’m going to share one simple technique today for creating blended lettering pieces using these fun pens.

How to blend markers supplies:

• Tombow Dual Brush Pens
• High Quality Smooth Paper such as Canson Marker Paper or Ultra Smooth Cardstock
• Blending Palette (I used a laminated piece of cardstock, but a plastic bag works well too)
• Gelly Roll Pen for details (optional)

Note: If you are new to brush lettering, be sure to check out my brush hand lettering basics post here.

First, you will want to pick out a few complimentary colors. For this first design, I used Imperial Purple (636), Hot Pink (743), and Coral (873).

Start by rubbing your darkest color on your blending palette (a laminated piece of cardstock works great for this or a plastic baggie will work just fine too). The ink will sit on top of the palette, so you can pick it up and blend it with another pen. Then, take your next color (for me this was the pink pen), and pick up some of the first color onto the brush tip. (Don’t worry – these pens are self-cleaning, which means the darker color will come off as you color, so you don’t have to worry about ruining your marker!) Next, begin your lettering piece. As you draw, the color will gradually shift from the darker color you picked up, to the lighter color of the pen.

Next, continue the ombre effect by putting some of the second color (pink for me) down on your palette, then pick that color up with the lightest marker (coral for me) to continue your lettering.

I repeated this process for each line of the design so the entire piece shifted from purple, to pink, to coral.

I finished this design up with some little sparkle details I added in with a white Gelly Roll pen.

I also made a quick video of how to blend markers with this design that you can check out below. Sometimes it’s fun to see the lettering in action!

How to blend markers video:

I created one more simple design using this how to blend markers technique that I want to share. For this design, I used only two colors – Deep Blue (565) and Sea Blue (373). I used the same basic blending technique for this piece. Rather than moving from one color to another across the piece, I simply kept going back and picking up more of the dark blue onto the lighter blue pen. This creates more of a varied, watercolor type effect.

When I was done lettering, I used the fine tip of the darker blue pen to draw little scale details onto the bottoms of my letters.

And that’s it! You can use this technique with all kinds of color combinations and for so many different types of lettering designs. I hope you will give it a try!

Happy Lettering!

Alexis

Alexis Middleton is a lifelong crafter/DIYer and blogger at Persia Lou. She started crafting at a young age. As a girl, she spent summers with her grandmother crocheting baby doll afghans, making coasters out of plastic canvas and yarn, and canning apricot jam. Today, Alexis spends a lot of time dreaming up and working on projects for her family’s home. She loves mixing traditional crafting techniques with a more modern aesthetic.